Rejoicing in the mysteries of God

The third Sunday in Advent is called "Gaudete Sunday". The introit quotes Philippian 4:4, "Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, rejoice". The Latin words are "Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete." We lit a reddish-pink candle on our Advent wreath in addition to two blue ones.

The basis of this tradition is that while the Scripture readings for the first two Sundays in Advent are rather grim lessons about Christ's purpose for being born in Bethlehem (to suffer and die on the cross) and His second coming in glory and judgment, in keeping with the idea of Advent as a season of repentance and reflection, on Gaudete Sunday the mood shifts more toward joy and hope as the celebration of the Nativity draws near.

We certainly had cause to rejoice on December 13, 2015, as Maria Gabriela Rosales was baptized, and Elias Montoya and Yaneth Torres were confirmed and received their first communion. My sermon text was the epistle, 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, which speaks of the ministers of the church as "servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God." What are the "mysteries of God" but the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, which we recognize, along with the preaching of the Word, as being central to our worship. You may read the complete English text of my sermon here.

Truly we rejoice in these young people and pray for them: Dearest Lord, we thank You that in the sacrament of baptism you bring new birth and life, making us members of Your holy family. We recall with gratitude our own baptisms, and pray that you would preserve Maria and us in Your baptismal grace. Help us to live in this world as Your redeemed children, serving You and our neighbors in love and devotion.

As You have made us all Your children in holy baptism, You have brought Elias and Yaneth through study of Your holy Word to know the meaning of their baptisms, and confess Your name as the only true God in Whom we have life eternal.

Always renew the strength of these young people that they shall rise up with wings like eagles. Grant them the faith of young Isaac; the vision of young Joseph; the obedience of young Samuel; the vigor of young David; the tenderness of young Jonathan; the wisdom of young Solomon; the courage of young Daniel; and the zeal of young Timothy. Deliver them from the temptations of youth, from unbelief, from forgetting their baptism, and losing the gift of Your Holy Spirit. Hear us for the sake of Your Son, Who redeemed us by His grace. Amén.

(Adapted from the "Lutheran Book of Prayer", Concordia Publishing House, 1970.)

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Liturgy: The Card Game

When I was a boy, I enjoyed playing an educational card game called “Authors”. The deck of cards consisted of eleven sets of four cards each representing the works of eleven famous authors. The object of the game was to form complete sets of the four cards comprising the works of a particular author. I remember another such card game called “Famous Movie Monsters”, which was just as much fun, although not so high-brow.

Luz Maria has developed a set of cards for the historic Lutheran liturgy. The object is to answer correctly as many questions as you can. Her daughter, Charli, provided the graphic design, while the text on each card was taken, with the author's permission, from an explanation of the liturgy (in Spanish) by Edmund Mielke, former missionary to Venezuela and now the pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, Brandon, Manitoba. Luz Maria and Charli have put together 10 sets of these cards with the intention of selling them for a nominal fee at the national convention of SOLUDAVE (Sociedad Luterana de Damas Venezolanas), the Venezuelan Lutheran women's organization. Luz Maria hopes the card game will be used as a tool for teaching the history and importance of the liturgy in all of the member congregations of the Lutheran Church of Venezuela.

Rev. Mielke entitled his treatise “Oficio Divino” (Divine Office). English-speaking Lutherans perhaps more often use the expression “Divine Service” in reference to what the Augsburg Confession continues to call “the Mass.” According to Article XXIV of the Augsburg Confession, “Falsely are our churches accused of abolishing the Mass; for the Mass is retained among us, and celebrated with the highest reverence.”

The term “Mass” is derived from the Latin word for dismissal. In the early Christian church, it was customary, after the preaching, or “service of the Word”, to dismiss all who were not baptized members of the church and then celebrate the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Thus, in the western half of the Roman Empire, where Latin was adopted as the liturgical language, the “mass” or dismissal of the unbaptized, at first signified the beginning of the sacramental service. Later it came to mean the entire service.

What is called “the Mass” in the tradition of the western European church is called the “Divine Liturgy” in the Greek Orthodox churches of eastern Europe and Asia. “Liturgy” comes from the Greek λειτουργια (“leitourgia”). This is a compound word combining “leitos” or public, with “ergon”, which means work or action. Leitourgia originally meant something provided as a service for the public by a benefactor of the ruling class. In Spanish, “oficio” can mean “official function” or “ministry” (the word for what we usually mean by “office” in English is “oficina”.) In fact, the word “leitourgia” occurs in the New Testament, where it is usually translated into English as “service” or “ministry” (Luke 1:23, 2 Corinthians 9:12, Philippians 2:17, 30, and Hebrews 8:6, 9:21). In Luke 1:23, Zachariah goes home when "the days of his liturgy” (αι ημεραι της λειτουργιας αυτου), or service in the Temple, are over.

In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament read by people who did not know Hebrew in New Testament times ) the word “leitourgia” (and nouns and verbs derived from it) is used to translate verses describing the ritual service of the temple (Numbers 4:24; Joel 1:9, 2:17). In Hebrews 8:6, the high priest of the New Covenant (Jesus) performs a better kind of “liturgy” than that of the Old Testament priests and Levites (νυνι δε διαφορωτερας τετυχεν λειτουργιας, οσῳ και κρειττονος εστιν διαθηκης μεσιτης, ητις επι κρειττοσιν επαγγελιαις νενομοθετηται) by sacrificing Himself once and for all time for the sins of the whole human race, and by continuing to act as Mediator between God and man. For this reason, propitiary sacrifices of animals have been eliminated from the worship of the New Covenant (because Christ's sacrifice on the cross covers all sin), as have the ceremonial/ritual purity laws which had to be obeyed before anyone could enter the Temple and participate in the Old Testament rites (because we enter the presence of God made holy by the blood of Christ).

Christ also instituted certain means for His salvation to be made known to the world and for the strengthening of the faith of those who believe. First the public proclamation of the Gospel to the ends of the earth and instruction in the doctrines of the faith (John 20:21-23, Matthew 28:19-20), and the sacraments of baptism (Matthew 28:19-20) and the Lord's Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23-24).

By “Divine Service,” “Divine Liturgy” or “Divine Office”, we mean the public preaching of the Word, which Christ Himself instituted for the benefit of believers and those who have yet to believe, and the administration of the sacraments, baptism for the receiving of people into the household of faith, and Holy Communion for the strengthening of faith in those who believe.

Article V of the Augsburg Confession states, "To obtain such faith, God instituted the preaching office to give Gospel and Sacraments. Through these, as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit, who works faith, when and where He pleases, in those who hear the Gospel.” Likewise Article XXIII of the Augsburg Confession says, “the sacraments were ordained, not only to be marks of profession among men, but rather to be signs and testimonies of the will of God toward us, instituted to awaken and confirm faith in those who use them. Wherefore we must so use the sacraments that faith be added to believe the promises which are offered and set forth through the sacraments.”

The service of the Word and sacraments is central to Christian worship. Although the New Testament gives no detailed description of early Christian worship, several other things are associated with the ministry of Word and sacrament: prayer (1 Timothy 2:8), singing of hymns (Ephesians 5:19). Scripture readings (James 1:22) and offerings of thanksgiving (1 Corinthians 16:1-2). Put all of these components together and a certain structure emerges. Thus we define Christian worship as God delivering the gifts of His grace, the forgiveness of sins and the promise of eternal life to those who repent and believe, through the means of Word and sacrament, the grateful response of His people with prayer and praise. This basic structure, or “liturgy”, has stood the test of time. We see it in the earliest full descriptions of the church's worship, such as the writings of Justin Martyr or the Didache. Because this structure is based directly the teachings of the Holy Scriptures, it is not negotiable and may not be set aside.

There are elements of the historic liturgy that we have inherited from the church of past centuries that are neither expressly commanded or forbidden by Holy Scripture. These are called “adiaphora”, from a Greek word that often is translated as “indifferent matters.” Many people think that to say something is an adiaphoron is to say it's purely a matter of personal preference, but this is not so. If something is commanded or forbidden by Scripture, then one is faced with a simple black versus white proposition. To refuse to do what God commands in Scripture, or to do what Scripture forbids is to defy the will of God, pure and simple. With adiaphora, however, there may be shades of gray. To accept or reject an adiaphoron may depend on the historical or cultural context in which one finds oneself.

For example, early in the 20th Century, many German Lutheran congregations in the United States adopted the custom of placing a United States flag on one side of the chancel and a “Christian flag” (a red cross on a blue field against a white background) on the other. This was because in the years preceding, during and following World War I, there was a great deal of prejudice and animosity toward German-speaking immigrants. The German Lutherans wanted to show that they were both devout Christians and loyal citizens who recognized the United States of America as “one nation under God.” Nowadays this practice strikes some people as blurring the proper distinction between church and state, and identifying Christianity too closely with “the American way of life.” Who is right? To display the banners of church and state in this way may have made sense in a certain time and place, but may not be considered appropriate in a more global era. That is the nature of adiaphora.

The Lutheran approach to such matters is a variation of the principle, “If it works, don't fix it.” If some practice has become part of the common heritage of the church, does not contradict Scripture, serves a useful purpose and does not create misunderstandings, it should by all means be preserved as ṕart of our worship.

Martin Lutheran published his “Formula Missae” (Latin Mass) in 1523. In his introduction to it, he wrote:

“We therefore first assert: It is not now nor ever has been our intention to abolish the liturgical service of God completely, but rather to purify the one that is now in use from the wretched accretions which corrupt it and to point out an evangelical use.”

So we say along with the Apology (Defense) of the Augsburg Confession, Articles VII and VIII: 33, “...we believe that the true unity of the Church is not injured by dissimilar rites instituted by men; although it is pleasing to us that, for the sake of tranquillity [unity and good order], universal rites be observed, just as also in the churches we willingly observe the order of the Mass, the Lord’s Day, and other more eminent festival days. And with a very grateful mind we embrace the profitable and ancient ordinances, especially since they contain a discipline by which it is profitable to educate and train the people and those who are ignorant.”

Confirmation and first communion for Gianny Vanessa Roa Ruiz

 Here is the English text of the sermon that I preached for the confirmation and first communion of Gianny Vanessa Roa Ruiz. It was based on Proverbs 9:1-10 and Luke 14:15-24, the appointed Old Testament and Gospel readings for the second Sunday after Trinity, according to the one-year lectionary.


Grace and peace in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Many of you are here at the invitation of our sister, Gianny Vanessa Roa Ruiz, because today is the day of her confirmation and first communion She wants to share her joy with you.

We find an invitation in our reading of the Old Testament. "Wisdom has built her house, hewn out its seven pillars killed her victims, mingled her wine, and set her table. She has sent her maids on the topto the rooftops of the town to cry, Whoever is simple, come here.”

In the book of Proverbs, the concept of wisdom is symbolized by the figure of a woman. In chapters before the ninth, is the contrast between the figure of Wisdom, who is good, and a tempting adulteress. These women represent two lifestyles, or two ways. Wisdom is the way of the Lord, that is, how to live according to the will of God. This is the way of happiness that lasts forever. The other is the path of destruction, in which there is the promise of many vain pleasures, but in the end is only a trap.

There is something more, because in our text for today we have a picture of a great feast, prepared by the figure of wisdom with an invitation for everyone. "Come, eat my bread, and drink the wine I have mixed." T his is a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ, who would be the true incarnation of divine wisdom and who has invited us to eat bread and drink wine, and also His body and blood in the Lord's Supper.
Furthermore,in our gospel for today, our Lord tells a parable, ie a symbolic story, of a man who prepared a great banquet and invited many. "And at the time of the banquet he sent his servant to say to those invited, Come, for everything is now ready."

But what happened? "And they all began to make excuses. The first said: I have bought a field, and I must go and see it: I pray thee have me excused. And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I'll try them out, excuse me. And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot go. "

What was Jesus talking about in this parable? Obviously, the father of the family is God the Father Almighty. His feast is eternal life in heaven. Why do so many refuse the invitation?  They do not see with eyes of faith the invitation to hear the word and receive the sacraments as a preview of the eternal feast in heaven. They are preoccupied with their businesses or their own personal matters. The same contrast is found in the book of Proverbs. Earthly affairs often seem more urgent or more attractive than seeking first the kingdom of God. However, the wise man, his mind enlightened by the Holy Spirit, understands that heavenly joy lasts forever, not just for the moment.

Furthermore, although the invitation to the Lord's Supper is free and for all, it is available only for a while. When our earthly life is over, so is the invitation and there is no second chance.

Look, many of you have received an invitation card for a wedding. The invitation is a gift for you. It's yours. Nobody can offer money to buy an invitation to a wedding. But what if someone takes an invitation card and throws it in the trash? He is not likely to get another invitation.

It is a more serious matter with the invitation to the Lord's Supper. We speak of the two kingdoms, the kingdom of God's power nd the kingdom of God's grace. The kingdom of divine power is the order of creation, the domain of His Law. The moral Law is the universal will of God for our lives. All humans are suubject to this Law and only one has fulfilled the Law, the will of God, perfectly. Therefore, to live under the Law is a sentence of physical and spiritual death.

However, one has fulfilled all the Law in our place, Jesus Christ. He paid the price for our sins, so we have our invitation to share in the joy of the Lord's Supper. One day we will be with Him in heaven, but in this world we have the opportunity to receive His body and blood in, with and under the bread and wine of the sacrament. "Do this in remembrance of me" does not just mean looking back to the first century, but also to anticipate the great feast with the church triumphant after the end of the world.
We have eternal life only by grace. No one can buy it and nobody earns eternal life on their own merits, however, we may decline the invitation and there is no other chance to escape eternal death.

We receive eternal life by faith alone through baptism. By our baptism, we are members of the body of Christ, the communion of saints, which is the church. The Bible says the invitation to baptism is for all nations, all families, men, women, old, young and babies. Why not share the sacrament with everyone?

In the Lutheran Church, we recognize only two sacraments, not seven as does the Roman Catholic church. By our definition, a sacrament should be instituted and commanded by our Lord Jesus Christ, should be a means of grace (forgiveness), and must have a visible element linked with the Word of God. In the case of baptism, the visible element is water, in the Lord's Supper the visible elements are the bread and wine.

 Confirmation is not a sacrament, it does not give a measure of grace that baptism that does not deliver. It is a ritual that marks the culmination of the preparation for first communion. The difference between the sacrament of baptism and the Lord's Supper is the warnings that to receive the Lord's Supper worthily, a person must examine his conscience and consciously repent of his sins, and discern the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament. To receive the sacrament unworthily is to receive condemnation, not a blessing.

So we teach these things to young believers with the Small Catechism of Dr. Martin Luther, written for parents to teach their children. The catechism contains the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, the Our Father and basic doctrine. Confirmation is a public testimony of faith and a sign that the believer is ready to receive the sacrament.

Now our sister, Gianny Vanessa, has chosen the better portion, like Mary of Bethany. She is a wise girl. Let's welcome her as a communicant member.
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The peace that passes all understanding be with each of you forever. Amen.

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Oriana's confirmation

We began the Sunday service by singing “Castillo Fuerte” (“A Mighty Fortress”). Then I explained why I was wearing a red stole and pectoral cross, and why the altar paraments were red.

First, because the Holy Spirit appeared as fire on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:3), and also the Scriptures say, “he shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit, and with fire” (Mateo 3:11, Luke 3:16); and “our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). So the color of fire symbolizes the force and energy of the Holy Spirit, active among us through the preaching of the pure Word and the administration of the sacraments as our Lord commanded. Since no one can confess Jesus as Lord except by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3), on Reformation Sunday we recognize the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in the public confession of the blessed Martin Luther, who stood before the powers of the world and declared his consciences was captive to the Word of God. Thus began the Reformation, which we accept as proof that the Spirit still guides the Church and keeps it in the true doctrine, not by new revelation, but rather by reaffirmation of the faith once delivered to the saints.

Second, red is the color of blood. For us especially, it symbolizes the blood of the holy martyrs, those who confessed Christ at the cost of their own lives. While God does not lay this destiny on all of us, He does demand that all of us offer ourselves as living sacrifices. That is to say, we are to be in every aspect of our lives, witnesses to Christ. The word “martyr” means “witness”, and so, with the martyrs as our examples, we understand every act of public confession to imply the promise that we formally make in the rite of confirmation, to remain faithful to the teachings of Christ to the point of death.

I preached on the appointed Old Testament lesson, 1 Samuel 3:19-21), explaining that in the context of this chapter, Samuel was a small boy, dedicated by his parents to the service of the Lord's temple in Shiloh where he lived and worked as the servant of the high priest, Eli. But Eli and his sons, the priests of Israel, were worldly and corrupt, and there were no true men of God to preach the Word of God to the people, and the people lost sight of God's will and drifted into unbelief.

But the Lord called audibly to Samuel while he slept, and the boy, thinking it was the high priest calling him, interrupted his master's sleep. Understandably irritated, Eli said that he had no called and told the boy to go back to bed. This happened three more times before Eli figured out that perhaps something unusual was taking place, and told Samuel the next time to answer the voice directly and immediately. This Samuel did, and received the first prophetic message that he was to deliver in the name of the Lord: To pronounce a judgment of death against Eli and his sons.

Of course, Samuel was afraid to do this, but since he realized he could not change the Word of the Lord and dare not disobey God's command, he did so anyway. Eli did not punish the boy, but, because of the remnant of faith left in his heart, recognized God s judgment as just and accepted it. The Lord continued to bless Samuel and as he mature, made him into a mighty and faithful prophet.

The application for us today is that as Christ has won for us salvation and eternal life through His death and resurrection, we must live by this truth and confess it publicly, even if it does not win us any popularity contests and even it means risking the loss of our lives. For we must love and obey God rather than men. “Also I say unto you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God: But he that denies me before men shall be denied before the angels of God” (Lucas 12:8-9).

This story of the boy Samuel was especially appropriate as the sermon text, because following the sermon, Luz Maria's granddaughter, Oriana Montoya, came forward for confirmation. At nine years of age, she is the youngest person who has been confirmed as a member of our mission congregation.

Oriana was born and baptized a few months before I arrived in Venezuela in 2003. I suppose that I can say that I have known her all of her life, and that she cannot remember a time when I was not a part of her life and her grandmother's life.

There was no rite of confirmation apart from the sacrament of baptism in the early church. Unlike baptism, confession and absolution of sins, and the sacrament of the altar, “confirmation” was not instituted or commanded by Christ. It emerged as a separate ceremony and eventually was declared a “sacrament” in itself by the western Latin-speaking Church. In Eastern Orthodox churches to this day, both infant children and adult converts are baptized, anointed with the laying on of hands (“chrismation”), and communed on the same occasion, in unbroken succession.

The Lutheran Reformers decided to retain the rite of confirmation, while denying that it was a divinely appointed means of grace, and against infant communion. This is because while the Scriptures place no reservations on who may receive the blessings of baptism, there are stern warnings against receiving the sacrament of the Lord's Supper “unworthily.” In order to participate in the sacrament of the altar, one must be able to examine his or her conscience and repent of sin (1 Corinthians 11:28), and discern the presence of Christ's body and blood in the sacrament (1 Corinthians 10:16; 1 Corinthians 11:29). The Reformers accept the western tradition of age 7 as the minimum age at which this level of understanding was possible, and 16th Century Lutheran church orders specify ages 7 to 12 as the optimum range for preparing children for first communion.

Later, in the 17th Century, under the growing influences of Calvinism and rationalism, the typical age of Lutheran confirmation was raised to 14 to 16 years, as confirmation came to be viewed more as a rite of passage into adulthood and the “completion” of a process begun with baptism.

Theologically speaking, however, baptism is the point of entry into the communion of the saints, and it isin baptism that one is covered with the righteousness of Christ, adopted as a child of God and receives the full promise of eternal life. There is no need to “complete” this process. On the other hand, it always has been the Lutheran understanding that catechesis, or instruction in the faith, is something that is a necessary part of sanctification (the Holy Spirit's work of molding us into the people God wants us to be), a process which is not complete until death. Therefore, catechesis should not stop at age 9, 12 or 16, but rather continue throughout adult life.

Therefore, having instructed and examined Oriana, and knowing of her desire to receive first communion with all of her friends and family as witnesses, I welcomed her into communicant membership in our mission.

As we prayed for Oriana and all those who had been baptized and confirmed at La Caramuca Lutheran Mission, I thought of another girl that I had known from birth through confirmation: my niece, Ashley Baltazar. I had stood up as a sponsor at her baptism, but at that moment I was particularly reminded of her confirmation at Zion Lutheran Church in Matteson, Illinois.

It was a congregation of mixed ethnic background in a similarly mixed community, and Ashley was confirmed along with young people of Caucasian, African and Latin American ancestry. Since Ashley's father, Mark, comes from a family that is Portuguese, Irish and Filipino, but mostly Filipino, the confirmation dinner consisted of traditional Filipino food. For me, mixed with the joy of Ashley's confirmation was a vision of what could be, a foreshadowing of Revelation 7, with a great multitude of all nations, all tribes and all races gathered around the throne of the Lamb. And it got me to thinking about the overseas mission field.

So at that moment I prayed for Oriana, for Ashley and for all who had made their vows of faith, that the Lord might keep them always in the true faith, strengthen them and call them back if they might stray. Amen.

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Knowing it by heart

Every day we open the preschool with the raising of the Venezuelan flag and the singing of the national anthem, followed by a Scripture reading, the Lord's Prayer and a couple of songs. One song goes like this:

El amor de Dios es maravilloso,

El amor de Dios es maravilloso,

El amor de Dios es maravilloso,

¡Cuan grande es el amor de Dios!

Es tan alto que no puedo ir arriba de él,

Tan profundo que no puedo ir abajo de él,

Tan ancho que no puedo ir afuera de él,

¡Cuan grande es el amor de Dios!

This is based, more or less, on Romans 8:39, “Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” There are movements to accompany the words of the song. For example, when you sing, “It's so high that I cannot rise above it,” you lift your hands up as high as you can. You lower your hands as far as you can for “It's so deep that I cannot sink beneath it,” and spread them as far as you can for “It{ s so wide that I cannot go outside of it.”

Luz Maria sang this song to her one-year-old granddaughter, Anyi, when Anyi was lying in a hospital bed with dengue fever. Despite the fact that dengue fever causes severe pain in the joints, Anyi began raising and lowering her hands in response to the song!

Rote learning may have a bad name in certain circles, but incidents like this illustrate its value. I am glad that a times of stress in my own life that I have not had to struggle to remember the creeds, the Lord's Prayer, key Bible verses and hymns. This I credit to the liturgical form of worship that we followed as a church (which was found in the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal for the first 20 years of my life).

For Sunday morning worship in La Caramuca, we follow the liturgy in Culto Cristiano, a Spanish-language hymnal first published by Concordia Publishing House in 1964. There has been no complete Spanish-language Lutheran hymnal published since then. Actually, many in the congregation, both children and adults, either cannot read at all or are semi-literate. However, the structure of the liturgy has enabled them to memorize the creeds, the Lord's Prayer, various hymns and the numerous Bible verses that are used in the liturgy.

Our place of worship is only a roofed patio (we hope that soon we might build a real chapel). Our altar is only a white plastic lawn table. Nevertheless we decorate the altar in the appropriate liturgical colors, which also are reflected in the altar candles and my vestments. The liturgical colors are a visual aid to help everyone recall important events memorialized in the church calendar and to remind them that we are, in fact, marking time. We are counting down the days until the Lord's return.

A gentleman named J.A.O. Stubb once wrote of his early experiences in a Swedish-American Lutheran church: “As grandfather turned to the Altar and intoned the Lord’s Prayer and the words of consecration, with the elevation of the host and the chalice, I felt as if God was near. The congregation standing reverentially about those kneeling before the Altar, made me think of Him who, though unseen, was in our midst. I forgot the old, cold church with its bare walls, its home-made pews and its plain glass windows. I early came to know some words of that service, such as: “This is the true body, the true blood of Christ”; “Forgiveness of sins”; “Eternal life.” I venture that all who, like me, early received such impressions of the Lord’s Supper, will approach the Altar or the Communion with a reverence that time will but slowly efface.” (J.A.O. Stubb, D.D., “Vestments andLiturgies”, 1920).

Of course, the Lutheran liturgy is not the invention of Swedish-Americans, nor of German-Americans, nor of any national/ethnic group, but rather is derived from pre-Tridentine versions of the Latin Mass (when people today speak of “the traditional Latin Mass”, usually they are thinking of the Tridentine Mass. This was developed at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and adopted as the standard order of worship by the Roman Catholic Church in 1570 (it would later be replaced as the norm by the post-Vatican II Novo Ordo in 1969).The Tridentine Mass was developed some time after the first specifically Lutheran form of the Latin Mass in 1523. As the Lutheran order of worship retained all the elements of the Mass except those that directly contradicted the principles of “Scripture alone, faith alone and grace alone,” the Tridentine Mass by design reflected the Council of Trent s rejection of those principles.

Nearly all Lutheran churches throughout the world use some form of the revised “Western rite”, translated into vernacular languages. One exception being the Ukrainian Lutheran Church, which subscribes to the Book of Concord, but uses an order of worship based on Byzantine (Greek Orthodox) liturgies. All variations of the Lutheran liturgy draw on the liturgical heritage of the ancient church (and beyond, since the worship of the early church was rooted in the liturgical worship of the Temple and the synagogues) as the most appropriate manner of conducting the ministry of the Word and the sacraments.

Christmas in June

Here in La Caramuca we got some presents early, as we were visited by a delegation from our national church, the Lutheran Church of Venezuela. The delegation included Pastor Elias Lozano, the newly elected president of the ILV; Pastor Miguelangel Perez, vice president of the ILV; and Pastor Abel Garcia, director of the Juan de Frias Theological Institute. They gave us some Spanish Bibles with Luther's Small Catechism included as an appendix. We hope to present them to our next group of confirmands.

These Bibles represent part of the work of the Lutheran Heritage Foundation, an organization that has has published the catechism in more than 50 languages, and published and distributed more than 450 titles and 3 million Lutheran books to pastors, seminary students, missionaries and churches. The Bible translation used is the 1960 revision of the Reina-Valera Bible. This is our preferred translation. There are more contemporary Spanish translations, and I know the argument that contemporary translations based on earlier manuscripts should be better than the translations of the Reformation era based on the Textus Receptus (the Reina-Valera, King James Version and Luther's German Bible). Unfortunately, most contemporary translations either reflect more of the theological and political prejudices of the translators or fail to convey the meaning of the original text as powerfully as the older translations.

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Pascua, Passover or Easter?

Feliz Pascua to everyone! I could say "Pascua" is Spanish for "Easter", because it is, but it literally means"Passover." In Spanish Bibles, the word used for the Jewish Passover festival is "Pascua", starting with Exodus 12:11 and continuing into the New Testament accounts. However, this is not a peculiarity of Spanish, according to an article by Anthony McRoy, posted on Christianity Today magazine's Christian History blog. In most of the languages of the world, the same word is used for the Jewish feast of Passover and the Christian celebration of Christ's Resurrection. The major exceptions are English and German, which use the words "Easter" and "Ostern" for the Christian holy day.

According to the Venerable Bede, an English monk who lived from 673 to 735 A.D. and who is a major source of information for modern historians about early Anglo-Saxon culture, the month of April was once dedicated to worship of the goddess Eostre. Anglo-Saxon language and culture was closely related to that of the Germanic tribes on the European continent, and 1,000 years after the Venerable Bede, Jakob Grimm (one half of the Brothers Grimm), wrote in his 1835 book, Deutsche Mythologie, that the festival of Ostern was derived from the worship of the goddess Ostara (an Old High German form of Easter).

These claims are often used to bolster the assertion that Christians copied existing pagan customs to accomodate new converts and that the church's liturgy and calendar are not truly Biblical, or even reflect early Christian belief.

One problem with this assertion, at least in the case of Easter, is that there is very little evidence outside of works of the Venerable Bede and Jakob Grimm that anyone ever worshipped a goddess called Eostre or Ostara. But there is an even bigger difficulty. McRoy writes:

"The Nordic/Germanic peoples (including the Anglo-Saxons) were comparative latecomers to Christianity. Pope Gregory I sent a missionary enterprise led by Augustine of Canterbury to the Anglo-Saxons in 596/7. The forcible conversion of the Saxons in Europe began under Charlemagne in 772. Hence, if "Easter" (i.e. the Christian Passover festival) was celebrated prior to those dates, any supposed pagan Anglo-Saxon festival of "Eostre" can have no significance. And there is, in fact, clear evidence that Christians celebrated an Easter/Passover festival by the second century, if not earlier. It follows that the Christian Easter/Passover celebration, which originated in the Mediterranean basin, was not influenced by any Germanic pagan festival."

Likewise, there is a popular notion that Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25 (or January 6 in Eastern Orthodox tradition) because pagans were celebrating the rebirth of the sun-god on that date and converts felt slighted that they did not have anything to celebrate. (The winter solstice, the longest night of the year, generally falls around December 21. Following the solstice, daylight hours gradually increase, thus the sun has been reborn.)

Of course, the Bible does not give a specific date for Christ's birth. Writing for Biblical Archaeology Review, Andrew McGowan notes that Clement of Alexandria in 200 A.D. listed several dates on which different groups of Christians celebrated His birth: March 21; April 15, 20 or 21; or May 20. It was not until 274 A.D. that the Emperor Aurelian declared December 25 a pagan holiday dedicated to worship of the sun (with little evidence that the date had special significance to anyone before the Christian era). By that time Christians in the western half of the Roman Empire had settled on December 25 as the day of Christ's birth, while in the eastern empire, January 6 had become the accepted date.

Why those dates? McGowan writes: "Strange as it may seem, the key to dating Jesus’ birth may lie in the dating of Jesus’ death at Passover...Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation -— the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year."

As for the eastern church: "In the East, too, the dates of Jesus’ conception and death were linked. But instead of working from the 14th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, the easterners used the 14th of the first spring month (Artemisios) in their local Greek calendar -— April 6 to us. April 6 is, of course, exactly nine months before January 6 -— the eastern date for Christmas."

Some of our holiday customs, such as Christmas trees, Easter eggs (maybe), holly and mistletoe, may have prechristian origins. But McGowan notes that prior to the fourth century A.D., Christians took great pains to distinguish Christian worship from the idolatry that surrounded them. "From the mid-fourth century on, we do find Christians deliberately adapting and Christianizing pagan festivals.

A famous proponent of this practice was Pope Gregory the Great, who, in a letter written in 601 C.E. to a Christian missionary in Britain, recommended that local pagan temples not be destroyed but be converted into churches, and that pagan festivals be celebrated as feasts of Christian martyrs. At this late point, Christmas may well have acquired some pagan trappings."

But the true roots of Christian worship and the church year are in the highly liturgical worship of the Old Testament, with its annual cycle of Scripture readings, sacrifices and sacred meals. This is not the result of human habit or whim.

Our Lord Himself knew exactly what He was doing when He instituted the sacrament of the Lord's Supper during the Passover meal. God Himself commanded the Israelites to observe Passover every year in Exodus 12:1-14, to remember how they were saved from divine wrath in Egypt (the tenth plague which claimed the life of every firstborn son) by the blood of a lamb without blemish. “Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it...The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt."

Divine judgment falling upon the firstborn son foreshadows the Passion of Christ as does the offering of an unblemished lamb. We also find this foreshadowing in Genesis 22, where God calls upon Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his only begotten son. Abraham follows God's command, firm in the hope that at the last moment, God would provide a lamb for the sacrifice in place of Isaac. And so that particular story ends, but the longer-term significance is that the real sacrificial lamb would be One Who was both the only begotten Son of God and a descendant of Abraham.

Jesus knew that after His last supper with His 12 disciples, there would be no more need to sacrifice animals for the atonement of sins. He Himself would atone for the sins of all people once and for all. The old Passover would be replaced by a new one in which God's wrath would "pass over" all who believe because of the "sign" of Jesus' blood.

Thus, "the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me" (1 Corinthians 11:23-25). Instead of offering up a lamb from our flocks in hope of placating God's wrath, we receive the body and blood of the Divine Lamb, Who has already redeemed us from our sins. In case anyone misunderstands this part, St. Paul writes in the verses following, "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself." And likewise, in 1 Corinthians 10:16, "The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?"

The new covenant in Christ's blood was not intended as a negation of the old, but rather a fulfillment and an amplification of it. We no longer sacrifice animals because Christ's sacrifice on the cross is all-sufficient. We do not observe the ritual purity laws of the Old Testament because we may approach God covered in the purity of Christ. We are adopted as members of God's people not through circumcision, but through baptism, also commanded by our Lord (Matthew 28:19-29), foreshadowed by the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and linked to the Lord's Supper.

"I want you to know, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.
In other words, life in Christ means participating in an exodus from slavery with others who have passed through the waters of baptism and who receive the same spiritual food and drink, that is, the body and blood of Christ. We only need to be baptized once, because Christ only needed to die on the cross once. But we continue to receive His body and blood, not just once a year, but as many times as we have the opportunity to partake of it, to sustain us in the wilderness of this world until His return in glory. It is then that we will enter our Promised Land.

But if we may freely approach God in worship and prayer with Christ as our Mediator, we still approach the same holy and righteous God of Abraham, Moses and the patriarchs. "Therefore," St. Paul writes, "my beloved, flee from idolatry." All of the Israelites passed through the Red Sea and were sustained by spiritual food and drink in the wilderness. "Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased...Do not be idolaters as some of them were; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.” 8 We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day."

This is a reference to the story of the golden calf in Exodus 32. How could the Israelites have fallen into idolatry so quickly after witnessing the miracles that Moses performed in the name of their God, and God Himself leading them in the form of pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night? Because they adopted a form of worship in imitation of the popular religiosity of the day. They made a golden image of the God that brought them out of Egypt as they imagined Him (no pun intended). They worshipped this image in the sensual and emotionally wanton way the pagans worshipped their gods. Soon what could not be distinguished from idolatry became idolatry and sexual immorality. As St. Paul writes, this stands as a lesson for us, that our worship should center on the preaching of the Word of God and the administration of the sacraments, as our Lord Himself commanded, with due reverence for the divine mysteries with which we have been entrusted and respect for the Biblically sound traditions of the church of the ages, not modeled on the idolatry of our time.

Draw nigh and take the body of the Lord
And drink the holy blood for you outpoured.
Offered was He for greatest and for least,
Himself the Victim and Himself the Priest.

He that His saints in this world rules and shields
To all believers life eternal yields,
With heavenly bread makes them that hunger whole,
Gives living waters to the thirsting soul.

Approach ye, then, with faithful hearts sincere
And take the pledges of salvation here.
O Judge of all, our only Savior Thou,
In this Thy feast of love be with us now.

Hymn #307
The Lutheran Hymnal
Text: Ps. 34:8
Author: Latin author unknown, c. 680
Translated by: John M. Neale, 1851, cento, alt.
Titled: "Sancti, venite, corpus Christi sumite"
Tune: "Old 124th"
1st Published in: Genevan Psalter, 1551

Six confirmed on Reformation Sunday 2010

Six young people were confirmed at our mission on Oct. 31, 2010. Here is the list of their names and confirmation verses:

• Jeison Manuel Arellano Farías, Philippians 4:7
• Jimmy Orlando Pérez Chinchilla, Joshua 1:9
• Angie Yoximar Pérez Chinchilla, John 10:27-28
• Yhonny Alexander Torres Ortega, Philippians 4:13
• Pedro José Santana Reimi, Psalm 50:15
• Karelis Santana Reimi, Psalm 51:10

This is the message that I had for them:

Today, Reformation Sunday, is a day of confession in two ways.

First, the confession of our sins. Every Sunday we begin the Divine Servie with the general confession of sins and receive absolution before the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. This is the day of first communion for six of you.

These six have been instructed according to the Small Catechism of Martin Luther, so they understand the importance of confession and repentance of all immorality and false belief before receiving the true body and true blood of Jesus Christ in, with, and under the bread and wine. Because he does not believe the words “given for you” or “shed for you for the forgiveness of sins,” or doubts them, is not worthy, nor is ready to receive Christ's body and blood. As St. Paul says, “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself” (1 Corinthians 11:28-29).

By confession, we also mean public confession of the faith. In today's text (John 8:31-36), our Lord tells us, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” The freedom Christ speaks of is freedom from sin. The truth of Christ, that is to say, His sacrifice on the cross, frees us from slavery to sin and Satan. Christ paid the price for the sins of the whole world on the cross, and so we are justified by faith in Him, and not by our own works. However, to remain true disciples of Christ, we must abide in His Word.

In holy baptism we received the complete assurance of eternal life in Christ and began the life of faith, we were born again of the Holy Spirit. Baptism was our first confession of faith by the work of the Holy Spirit. As it says in Mark 16:16, “He who believes and is baptized, will be saved; but he does not believe, will be condemned.” In baptism we receive the gift of saving faith.

But, it is possible to lose the benefits of baptism, if we do not abide in the Word of God. We have this Word in the Holy Scriptures, the source and rule of our faith. The Scriptures, written by the apostles and the prophets, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, tell us all that we need to know for our salvation. In the Bible, God speaks to every one of us.

But abiding in the Word is not just a matter of listening, reading and reflecting inwardly. The Word at times demands a verbal response.

For it also is the work of the Holy Spirit when we say “I believe” in the Word of God. As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:3, “No one can say Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit.”

Also, when Simon Peter said, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God,” our Lord replied, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah; for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father, Who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17).

On the day of their wedding, a bride and groom promise each other to love and live together until death. But, for them to fulfill this commitment, it will be necessary, at times, to reaffirm these vows in the years to come, in times of joy or grief. What do you think, should it be sufficient for a man and wife to say to each other, “I love you” on their wedding day and never again? For a man to kiss his wife on the wedding day and never again? Of course not!

In the same way, the promise of salvation and faith that we receive in baptism is for always. But a times we must reaffirm our trust in the Word of God, not just to reinforce our own faith, but to testify of Christ's truth to the world.

That is why on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany, calling the church back to the basic truths of the Holy Scriptures: justification by faith alone, salvation by grace alone and the Scriptures as the only infallible rule of faith. Later, Luther, a simple German monk, stood before Charles V, in his day emperor of all Europe and as King of Spain, ruler of the Spanish colonies in the New World, including Venezuela, and representatives of the Roman church and the empire and confessed this faith.

Karelis, Pedro, Jeison, Yhonny, Angie, Jimmy.

They said to him, “Recant the teachings of justification by faith alone, salvation by grace alone and the Scriptures as the only rule of faith under pain of death.” And Luther replied, "Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason - I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicteyd each other - my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen."

In your confirmation today, six of you will publicly confess the faith in which you were baptized. Let us thank God that we live in a country where there is freedom of conscience, so that you do not confess under pain of death at this very moment. However, as you have abided in the Word of God until this moment, you must testify to its truth with your lips. Also, today we remember Luther and others who risked their lives for the pure doctrine of the Bible and express our solidarity with believers in countries where Christians are persecuted.

May God bless you richly on this Reformation Day, and this day of your first communion. Amen.

Feliz Navidad 2009

A most blessed season a greetings from all of us. We celebrated our first Christmas Eve service in La Caramuca on Thursday, December 24, 2009. It was a communion service followed by a Christmas dinner for about 30 children, youth and adults.

In fact, it was our first midweek service of any kind. It is no mean feat to get people in Venezuela to gather on Sunday morning, never mind during the week. And, as I have said before, church attendance is particularly low during the Christmas and Easter holidays, as nearly everyone heads to the beach or the mountains, or stays home to party. So we thank God for the good response this year.

The Christmas dinner was traditionally Venezuelan: hallacas, pan de jamon and potato salad. Hallacas are like Mexican tamales, but instead of being wrapped in corn husks, they are wrapped and cooked in smoked banana leaves. The ingredients include at least three types of meat. It is the custom to go door to door and present bags of hallacas to your friends and family as a Christmas gift. Hallacas require a vast amount of work to prepare, which seems to be the whole point. Luz Maria and her daughters spent the two days before Christmas Eve cooking hallacas.

Venezuelans consider hallacas more essential to Christmas than anything else and are quite puzzled when you tell them the main dish for Christmas dinner in the United States might be ham, turkey, roast beef or whatever.

Pan de jamon is bread with slices of ham baked in. This you can purchase from the bakery. The potato salad is jus potato salad.



St. Nicholas visits our preschool

We closed the preschool for the three-week holiday break on December 12 with a Christmas party for the children, their teachers and parents. San Nicolas (also known as Papa Noel or even Santa Claus) made a special appearance. If you follow the church calendar, you may recall Sunday, December 6, was the day of commemoration for Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop who provided the historical template for all the variations of the gift-giving elf king.

Recently it was reported that Dr. Caroline Wilkinson of England's Manchester University, using measurements of the bishop's skull (which still exists) and modern computer technology, reconstructed the face of St. Nicholas. The result is quite similar to traditional portraits of St. Nicholas, except for one thing: He had a badly broken nose, similar that of a boxer or hockey player. This might be considered consistent with the story that Nicholas got involved in fisticuffs with the arch-heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., a fight that had to be broken up by fellow bishops.

Jesus and John the Baptist

However, since the beginning of the Advent season, we have spoken more of John the Baptist and his relation to Jesus, both at Sunday service and in the midweek Bible lesson in the preschool. The story of how Mary visited her relative, Elizabeth, after the archangel Gabriel had announced the impending birth of Jesus (Luke 1:39-45) provided the opportunity to talk about when human life begins. The passage in Luke says that in his mother's womb, John leaped for joy at the sound of Mary's voice, because even unborn John was a prophet and knew that Mary was, as both his mother, Elizabeth and the angel had said, "blessed among women" and would give birth to the promised Messiah. This passage is one of many in the Bible which asserts that human life begins in the womb and that, therefore, those who say abortion does not constitute the taking of a human life are wrong.

We also talked of how John the Baptist, with his call to repentance, was, as Luther wrote, the consummate preacher of the Law, which convicts people of sin. But Jesus, was in His Person the living Gospel itself, Who through his life, death and resurrection made possible reconciliation between a just and holy God, and sinful human beings. But the relationship between Jesus and John illustrates that Law and Gospel are inseparable. They were friends and relatives, and both were sent by God. The archangel Gabriel announced both their births and both births were miraculous; Jesus was born to a virgin and John to a woman past childbearing years. Jesus said of John, "Among those born of women, there has arisen none greater than John the Baptist" (Matthew 11:2-10) and in Matthew 17:10-13 that John fulfilled the prophecy that Elijah would return before the Messiah came. John said of Jesus that he, John, was not worthy to untie Jesus' shoelaces and "Behold, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:27-30).

Finally we talked of the difference between John's baptism and the baptism of Jesus. The baptism of John was an exterior ritual that expressed an interior state (repentance), which is how some people think of Christian baptism today. But, as John himself said, the baptism of Christ is quite different. It is truly baptism with water and the Holy Spirit, in which we receive the forgiveness of sins, the adoption as children of God and the righteousness of Christ. The promise of baptism does not depend on our own will, understanding or state of mind, and in that we take comfort in times of doubt.

Our Spanish hymnal, Culto Cristiano, contains a version of the Matins service with the Benedictus or Song of Zechariah (the words are based on Luke 1:68-79, the priest Zechariah's song of thanksgiving upon the birth of his son, John the Baptist). Sadly we have not had much opportunity to use the Matins service here, and I am not sure if I can recall the music well enough to sing the Spanish version of the Benedictus. But it always was, along with the Te Deum Laudamus, my favorite part of Matins.

Image via Wikipedia

Let us praise the Lord, the God of Israel,
For He has come and redeemed His people.
He has raised up a mighty Saviour for us
From the house of His servant David,
As He promised long ago
Through His holy prophets,
That He would save us from our enemies,
From the power of all who hate us.
He promised to show mercy to our ancestors,
And to remember His holy covenant,
The oath which he swore to our father Abraham,
To rescue us from the power of our enemies,
So that we might worship the Lord without fear,
Holy and righteous in His sight
All the days of our lives.
And you, my child, will be called the prophet of the Most High,
For you will go before the Lord to prepare His way,
To give the knowledge of salvation to His people
By the forgiveness .of their sins.
Through the tender mercy of our God,
The day of salvation will dawn on us from heaven,
To shine on those who live in darkness and the shadow of death,
To guide our feet into the way of peace.


Speaking of light in the darkness

Thanks to generous donations from supporters in the United States, we have purchased a gasoline-powered generator. Several weeks ago Luz Maria went out to get an estimate on the price of a generator and found a wide array of models of different sizes and prices. When we returned to the shop where she found the best deal, there were only two models left in stock. Clearly other people had the same idea that we did. We continue to experience almost daily power outages of several hours duration.

There remains one obstacle to putting the generator in place; another of our mysterious shortages of materials, this time of cement. We do not want to run the generator in our living quarters, neither do we want it stolen, so we must build an outdoor enclosure. And that will have to wait until we can get cement.

Nevertheless we thank the donors for this Christmas present.

Communion wafer conundrum

When I was a boy, my father would from time to time take me with him on his trips into "town". We actually lived in the town of Yale, but the population was only about 200 people. The "big town" was Huron, SD, which today has a population of a little less than 12,000. It may have been a little more back in the 1960s. The South Dakota State Fair has been held in Huron since 1905.

On these trips my Dad would make his hospital calls (I would read magazines in the waiting room or in the car during these), record his monthly sermonette at KIJV radio, and buy supplies for the church, including the communion wine and wafers. As I recall, he would buy a couple of big boxes of the communion wafers.

I never thought much about the communion wafers at the time, since I was more fascinated by the radio station and the Christian bookstore that we sometimes visited (it was there I first encountered the works of C.S. Lewis). For 40 years afterwards, I never thought much about the communion wafers, either. But lately I have been thinking a lot about the ease with which Dad was able to procure them.

Because, at least at that time, Roman Catholic and "mainline Protestant" churches all used the same mass-produced communion bread. It was always a specialized market and nowadays it seems more than 80 percent of all communion wafers used by Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran and Southern Baptist churches in the United States are produced by the family-owned Cavanagh Company of Rhode Island.

The situation is a little different in Venezuela. Communion wafers here are not commercially produced, but rather baked in convent kitchens. The preparation of special altar bread in convents and monasteries is a tradition that predates even the split between western and eastern Christendom in 1054 A.D. (when the churches of eastern Europe and the Middle East rejected the Pope's claim to be visible head of the Christ's church on earth).

Luz Maria's father, Antonio Rivero, died when she was eight years old, leaving behind his wife and eight children. Luz Maria was placed in a convent school, where she lived until she was 13. She remembers the nuns making communion wafers in a device similar to an electric waffle-iron.

So in Venezuela you only can obtain traditional communion bread through convents or Roman Catholic churches. For many years the Catholic institutions were happy to share (unconsecrated, of course) communion bread with Lutherans. You could just go to any Catholic church and receive a package of wafer in return for a nominal sum (a free-will offering, more or less). Unfortunately this situation has changed.

I first became aware of this when I was in Caracas with Pastor Miguelangel Perez, just before returning with him to Barquisimeto for the 15 anniversary of Cristo es Amor (Christ is Love) Lutheran Church. He needed communion wafers for Barquisimeto and I needed some for La Caramuca. He said it would be best to look in Caracas, because it was becoming difficult to obtain communion bread in Barquisimeto.

So we took a bus to the center of Caracas, then we walked down one street, took a left, walked some more, took a right, took another left, etc. Finally we wound up in front of a grated window on a backstreet. Miguelangel explained who we were to the nun who let us in a narrow door into a very nice convent lobby. She told us she only had a couple of hundred wafers to spare, but we will welcome to them for free. So we accepted the Glad bag full of communion bread.

I realized later that there was no way I could find my way back to the same hole-in-the-wall convent in Caracas on my own, so a couple of weeks ago, when we again needed more communion bread, Luz Maria decided to look in Barinas. She had to go to the main Catholic church, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Pilar (built between 1770 and 1780, it is a fine specimen of Spanish colonial architecture) and do a lot of talking before she was able to get a new supply of communion wafers.

We could order packages of communion wafers on the Internet, but in order to have them delivered to Venezuela we would have to pay the extremely high import duties placed on all food products. More likely we will begin baking our own communion bread, since we have the exact recipe for unleavened bread that is traditionally used in the sacrament. Luz Maria would like to buy a wafer mold like she remembers the nuns using in the convent, but that we have not been able to find on-line or anywhere else.

This may seem trivial, but the underlying reason for our difficulty in obtaining communion wafers is more serious. We have been told the Roman Catholic churches are becoming more reluctant to share communion bread with people who do not have proper Catholic credentials because of the growth of Santeria in Venezuela.

Santeria is a cult that originated in Cuba among African slaves. Most of the slaves brought to Cuba were from the Yoruba tribe that lived in what is now known as Nigeria.

As slaves, the Africans were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism, but continued their ancient traditions by identifying their tribal gods with the Virgin Mary and Catholic saints. Santeria literally means "the way of the saints", but the phrase has a connotation of contempt in Spanish. Among themselves, practitioners of Santeria refer to their religion as "la regla lucumi" or "la regla de ocha" (lucumi and ocha are both African words). The practice of Santeria involves persons becoming possessed by the orisha (saints/gods), animal sacrifices to gain the favor of the orisha, casting of spells and fortune-telling. Many santeros (Santeria priests) insist Santeria is all about white magic (using the power of orisha only for benevolent purposes), but there is ample evidence of black-magic Santeria (casting spells to injure or kill) as well.

This is very similar to other Caribbean and South American cults, such as voodoo in Haiti, candomble and macumba in Brazil, and, of course, Venezuela has its homegrown versions of this type of thing, such as the worship of Negro Felipe (Black Philip), an Afro-Venezuelan deity. Underlying it all is the fundamentally pagan world-view in which the Creator (although identified with the Christian God due to the historic dominance of the Catholic Church) is not interested in the everyday affairs of human beings, but there are intermediate gods and goddesses who will help or hinder one's fortunes depending on their whims.

The existence of these cults is largely the result of forced conversions and Roman Catholic teaching regarding the Virgin Mary and the saints. Catholic theologians try to draw a distinction between their veneration of Mary and the saints and polytheistic worship, but this abstract difference is impossible to maintain in practice (as well as being contrary to the plain teaching of Scripture in the first place).

In fact, the practice of Santeria is growing throughout the Caribbean Basin (and parts of the United States with high concentrations of Latin-American immigrants) precisely because the santeros have become particularly aggressive in insisting that there is no essential difference between their beliefs and practices and those of the Roman Catholic Church.

Santeria may have received something of a political push as well. Reportedly santeros were patronized by people from all levels of Cuban society before the revolution, including one Fidel Castro. When Cuba became a client state of the Soviet Union, Castro began suppression of all religion to conform to Marxist ideology. With the decline of Russian Communism, the open practice of Santeria was allowed to re-emerge and has become a tourist attraction. Today, to the extent that there is a favored religion in Cuba, it is Santeria. As Cuba has developed closer ties with Venezuela, there has been increased movement of Santeria into Venezuela.

What all of this has to do with communion wafers, I am not quite sure. Although there are some things commonly known about the practice of Santeria, the details of many Santeria rituals have been kept secret. There seems to be a reluctance to talk about just what the santeros are doing with communion wafers. But I may have found a clue in "Santeria: The Soul Possessed", a low-budget film, supposedly based on a true story, about a Mexican boy who received a "cursed" communion wafer.

The growth of Santeria in Venezuela and the scarcity of communion wafers are both real phenomena. As is usually the case with matters regarding magic and the occult, I am not sure I want to know more about the connection between the two. But I urge you to pray for us on both these accounts.